Former Bosnian star Sergej Barbarez

Guardian reports:

Thirteen Bosnia national team players have threatened to boycott international call-ups unless the heads of the Bosnian Football Association (NFSBIH) resign…

“We will no longer accept call-ups to the national team while these people are performing these functions, hoping that our gesture will mark the first step in the healing of this cancer in our soccer and a new beginning for the national team for which our hearts beat,” the letter said.

Sport should provide equal opportunity to all and then the best should comprise teams at various levels. Ethnic preference is no way to run sport as famous and just retired Bosnian football hero Sergej Barbarez has said.

If the threatened boycott is indeed implemented, there might be some changes but I doubt if there will be major structural changes over all in the way Bosnian football is run as the problems run deep:

The domestic league is also in a poor state, mired in allegations of corruption and match-fixing. The NFSBIH is run on ethnic lines that reflect the delicate balance between the country’s two parts, the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation, created after the 1992-95 war.

Root causes of sporting problems are usually not in the sporting realm but they occur as a consequence of problems politically or otherwise in a country as we see in Bosnia. From wikipedia:

Tensions between the three constitutional peoples remain high in BiH and often provoke political disagreements. Each of the three peoples are influential to roughly a same degree in Bosnia with Bosniaks being the most numerous, Serbs having their own entity, and Croats, though politically marginalized, being the strongest economically.

I am immediately reminded of the crisis Zimbabwe cricket finds itself in at the moment. A lot of players have protested and resigned. Zimbabwean cricket remains in a deep hole and not much has improved. I am apprehensive that there will sweeping changes but even if some good can come from the protests and even if small changes are made in the way Bosnian football is run, it would be a successful move.

In any case, it is much better to protest and live a poorer or less priveleged life than a discriminated one.

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